Despite the author’s obsession with unmasking the Golden State Killer, all of the hours and years she put into it, she passed away before the book was completed and published. Her husband and editor (?) put it together and filled in what was missing based on her notes. Michelle McNamara did not live to see the Golden State Killer caught using DNA evidence. It looks like there is an afterword in the book to cover that.

I didn’t consider him a ghost. My faith was in human error. He made a mistake somewhere along the line…

For more than ten years, a mysterious and violent predator committed fifty sexual assaults in Northern California before moving south, where he perpetrated ten sadistic murders. Then he disappeared, eluding capture by multiple police forces and some of the best detectives in the area.

Three decades later, Michelle McNamara, a true crime journalist who created the popular website TrueCrimeDiary.com, was determined to find the violent psychopath she called “the Golden State Killer.” Michelle pored over police reports, interviewed victims, and embedded herself in the online communities that were as obsessed with the case as she was.

I’ll Be Gone in the Dark—the masterpiece McNamara was writing at the time of her sudden death—offers an atmospheric snapshot of a moment in American history and a chilling account of a criminal mastermind and the wreckage he left behind. It is also a portrait of a woman’s obsession and her unflagging pursuit of the truth. Utterly original and compelling, it has been hailed as a modern true crime classic—one which fulfilled Michelle’s dream: helping unmask the Golden State Killer.